N-able was a pioneer in offering remote monitoring and IT automation to small and medium-sized businesses, a technology that was previously only available to the big firms, says Mr. Garbutt, who's been with the Ottawa-based company since it was founded in 2000.
Part of that success came from recognizing that broadband Internet would open up this world to smaller enterprises, Mr. Garbutt says. The firm also let companies try some services free before committing, something N-able says is an industry first.
The heart of N-able's business comes from its network of managed service providers that monitor and support the performance and health of their client's IT infrastructure. These MSPs are the people whom SMEs commonly call upon to support their networks and IT, and be their outsourced IT departments.
"(MSPs) can show (customers) the report, show them they have problems they didn't know they had, and upsell their services," Mr. Garbutt says.
"We generated this idea back in 2008 when we saw this market was a bit tough ... (and asked) how are we going to help the adoption?"
SMEs managed by these partners now stand at more than 59,000, more than double the 22,000 in 2010. Device usage also grew by 235 per cent.
The company has worked hard to get this far, and was lucky to do so, since in its earliest days it had few customers willing to sign up.
Remote monitoring of networks relies on high-speed broadband, something that was expensive when N-able first launched more than a decade ago. For several years, the company depended on angel financing to stay afloat.
"When you're balancing on the edge of the razor, the important thing is ... to make sure you have a service you can sell to that customer base today as you are developing your bleeding-edge technology," he says.
But that was a lesson learned in retrospect, he says, adding the niche for N-able's applications was competitive, but it just was a matter of getting the user base in place before reaching the profitable position the firm is in today.
N-able also is getting attention in the form of institutional financing, which came for the first time in late 2011 when Accel-KKR - a technology-focused private equity firm - invested an undisclosed amount of money in N-able.
When asked if the accelerated growth is sustainable, Mr. Garbutt says company research shows there are 66 million SMEs worldwide, with only about 15 per cent market penetration.
"So 85 per cent of the market is still not managed," he says.
"We haven't even begun to get close to that, so that's one of the beauties. The other thing is we do have multiple tools. We have our core central management and automation platform, but we also sell an anti-spam product, anti-virus product and backup product."
As such, the hiring process is already underway for an additional 15 to 20 people, with the bulk of them in Ottawa. This will add on to a current worker base of 165 people.
